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Billable hours: a spooky story

Happy Halloween! To celebrate the day of ghosts and ghouls and haunted houses, I’ll share a short and spooky story about billable hours. I heard this story from another attorney, to whom this incident actually happened. Technically, that makes it hearsay (any exceptions? excitable utterance? voice emanating behind the walls?). Anyway, I digress…

This particular attorney (we’ll just call him Mr. Ghost) had an assistant (let’s call her Pumpkin). Mr. Ghost was a partner at a large law firm, and Pumpkin used to enter his billable time for him. This in and of itself was not unusual; after all, the vast majority of partners and even associates have their secretaries enter billable time. What was unusual, however, was that when his monthly totals came in, they always looked low. What felt like a 200 billable hour month was recorded as 170. A month that he swore he billed at least 250 hours was recorded at around 225. It felt low, but Mr. Ghost was too busy to look into it. This unusual activity occurred for many months.

Finally, during one month when the billable total was WAY low, Mr. Ghost spooked and decided to look into the matter. What he discovered was shocking. Pumpkin, who was not very good with math, had been taking his handwritten time logs (one hour 30 minutes here, three hours 50 minutes there) and converting them to the decimal system that the time entry software would recognize. But she was doing it all wrong. One hour 30 minutes became 1.3 hours; three hours 50 minutes became 3.5 hours. Mr. Ghost just lost 32 minutes of billable time from Pumpkin’s improper conversions!